CD Projekt RED’s Jonas Mattsson has assured RPG fans that pesky loading times in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt are an endangered species, unless you die a lot. The entire open world is free of loading screens and bars.
The only parts they’ll obnoxiously interrupt is initially loading the game, recovering from a Witcher-related demise, fast-travelling long distances, and visiting the isles of Kaer Morhen.
Otherwise the big open world streams everything in, which is something the studio has talked about before ages ago, and how they improved its efficiency so as not to bog down hardware.
”For story purposes, we do have some places like the Prologue Area, as we call it. The introductory area. It’s a smaller open world created to make sure that the player understands the rules of the game and get to grips with the controls and so on. It’s a mini open world, and once they’ve mastered how it plays, we just unleash them into the full open world,” he told Gamespot.
”But on the full open world, there’s no loading time. You can travel and roam around as you wish.”
”No, there’s no loading times,” Mattsson reiterated. ”Only when you actually start the game, when die and load the game, or when you fast travel. That fast travel loading time depends on how far you have to travel of course. If you just fast travel a little bit, it’s a really short loading time.”
”One of the goals we had was to keep the experience as fluid as possible. When you play, you don’t want to have the loading screen because it takes you out of the game a bit. We wanted to make sure that it was as smooth as possible, one big experience. For us, that was really important. I think we achieved that because, as you said, just going in and out of a building, there’s no loading time. Nothing. It’s just creates this really nice experience.”
Check out the full interview between Jonas Mattsson and Gamespot for more.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt releases on PC May 19th.
[center]<iframe width="640" height="360" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nYwe_WHARdc?rel=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>[/center]
